POLICING the Gaza ceasefire deal is a task that cannot be left to the Great Powers. Neither can it be left to the regional powers, whose interest in making sure it sticks long enough to make the second stage a reality is not enough to compensate for the decisive role played by the US in shaping Israeli government strategy.

The extent of Joe Biden’s complicity in the genocidal actions of the Israeli state is made exactly clear in the failure of his administration to do anything substantial to restrain the Israeli military onslaught right up to the moment he leaves office.

Paradoxically it seems that it is pressure exacted by the incoming presidential election-winner that is the decisive factor in bringing about this agreement at this late stage.

Precisely what pressures are exerted on this most impulsive and transactional US politician is hard to gauge but the superpower status of global public opinion allied to US domestic opinion are factors.

The battered people of Gaza and the wider Palestinian community hope that this ceasefire will hold, that the exchange of Israeli hostage prisoners and the people held by the Palestinian resistance will continue and that the next stages, which include the withdrawal of the invading Israeli troops and the eventual reconstruction of life in the coastal strip, will come about.

This ceasefire is something of a victory for the Palestinian people, achieved at a terrible cost and with the support of an absolute majority of the world’s peoples.

It is a victory in the sense made clear by Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who remarked that the sum effect of the Israeli actions is measured by the full extent of support renewed for Hamas. If Benjamin Netanyahu’s war aim was the destruction of Hamas he has failed.

But undoubtedly Hamas will be changed by this experience and its new recruits. It will have to renew itself in new conditions where imperialism has achieved some of its goals.

It is a victory in the sense that a combination of factors has resulted in a stay in Netanyahu’s bid to maintain the conflict in a kind of perpetuity where he can be kept out of court and out of jail.

Those willing to believe Netanyahu has maintained the fiction that the intransigence and lethality of the Israeli onslaught were because of the pressure exerted on him and his government by the rabid extreme right wing in the Knesset will believe anything.

The fact is, his Knesset majority does not depend on them while the actions of the security cabinet he leads are precisely his responsibility.

Today’s 23rd national march for Palestine will be dramatised by demonstrators carrying flowers, a toy or child’s shoe to commemorate the victims of Israel’s genocide.

It shows that a decisive political majority of the British people stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. We must maintain the vigilance and mass activity of this movement as our contribution to the transformation of the ceasefire into a lasting restraint on imperialism’s permanent strategy of division and domination.

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has made it clear that there has been “no real effort” by Israel to probe alleged Gaza war crimes.

How can it be anything other, when the main allies and armourers of the Israeli state refuse to implement the arrest orders that the ICC has issued in relation to the war in Gaza?

This imperial disregard for the ICC is a clear expression of the contempt the neoliberal elite, and it must be said, of wider sections of liberal opinion, for the values of human rights and equality before the law that they espouse.